


The Disciple at the Feet of Rapture

by intoholybattle



Series: The Disciple at the Feet of Rapture [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: M/M, Non-Human Genitalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 04:37:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20334193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intoholybattle/pseuds/intoholybattle
Summary: Fray said to Sidurgu: "There's only one way I can live with you here, and that's if you swear not to touch my things." In this tale, Sidurgu touches the things.





	The Disciple at the Feet of Rapture

It was a balmy autumn evening in Ishgard, and Sidurgu had lost his whetstone.

Four or five summers ago this would never’ve happened. But now Fray was here, and Fray lived differently. He did not see the work of a Dark Knight as a solemn duty; he was not satisfied with killing the barely-human refuse that oppressed Her people with such impunity, then vanishing into the night. "Victories want celebrating," he’d say. Then he’d drag Sid to some seedy alehouse in a back alley where they’d linger for bells on end. If anyone asked what the occasion was, Fray told them it was his nameday. It was always his nameday.

Living in this unending festival that began with death and ended with wine, Sid found his routines lost their power. There were days when he dropped entire exercises from his regimen, carried off by Fray on a whim. He’d slain five Temple Knights once, with a massive hangover, before he realized he’d left every bit of his jewelry on the nightstand. He misplaced things. At first, Sid feared Ompagne’s wrath at this nascent carelessness; the old Master seemed almost pleased. Sid found it annoying, if he was honest.

Their latest excursion had gone on almost ‘til dawn. They’d come stumbling back to Cloud Nine arm-in-arm, but Sid said something to offend Fray on the stairs, and he’d stomped away and not come back. Sid did not retire, but instead spent the morning caring for Deathbringer, watching the sun rise through the window and feeling sorry for himself until he drifted off to sleep. That was fine—but now he couldn’t find the bloody whetstone.

Fray upended everything. The years of comfortable habit. The stable relationship he’d had with his Master, and his Master alone. Certainly Sid’s days had been boring before, but his evenings were a matter of life and death. The boredom gave him a reprieve. Fray cared not for reprieve. Fray wanted to _carouse_. Fray put Sid to bed besotted at three in the morning when Ompagne expected him for training at sixth bell.

And then! Then he had the nerve to simply wander away as if he were beholden to no one. He was probably already in bed, in the arms of one of his many paramours, with nary a care in the world. It disgusted him. Fray, he decided, was ten ponzes of trouble in a five ponze sack. He had a puckish nature, and quiet footfalls; there was a chance, however small, that he'd hidden the whetstone while Sid slept to get back at him. Thus did he resolve not to feel guilty for looking through Fray’s things—for that was the last place left to search.

Sid did not have very much of his own, having small interest in clothes and mementos; Fray loved them, and their closet was full mostly of Fray’s wardrobe. In the myriad coats and trouser pockets Sid found lose change, a wine cork, a forgotten bag of pipe-weed, and lastly a rubber tucked in an inner pocket—which he immediately returned to its exact place as if it were a cursed artifact, resolving to move on.

He overturned the piles of armor in the closet corner and ruminated on his comrade’s easy morals. What was there in it for him? It wasn’t the thrill sex must’ve been, but Sid got along fine without twenty adoring beaus to chose from each night. Betimes it didn’t seem worth it, frankly. That Fray—impervious, unshakable Fray—would oft fall into dark moods over this or that lover’s thoughtlessness spoke to the pitfalls of such dalliances. And there’d only been so bloody many of them because none of them ever lasted. They couldn’t. Sooner or later they’d want to know where he was running off to of a night. Sooner or later they’d want the blood and the bruises explained. Sooner or later, they’d have questions about that frightful Auri man with whom he kept such close company, and if they watched the two of them go up to one room together they’d come to an upsetting, and mistaken, conclusion.

The bed. He checked underneath it and found nothing there save one of Fray’s old stockings, covered in dust and with a run up the side. He dove next into the armoire, checking his drawer first, pushing aside the rumpled smallclothes, the light undershirts he rarely wore, creased from disuse these many turns of the sun. In his head he could hear Fray saying, “Fury’s mercy, a sack of flour’d have more charm.”

The bastard. The dandy. Who could call himself a Dark Knight, yet find time to _fold his clothes_?

He snapped his drawer shut. He opened Fray’s. He stared at it. There was no need to, and naught to be silly about. He _had_ seen his underwear before; you couldn’t share a room and a bed with a man and not glimpse him in the altogether. But seeing and touching were different things, and to search, one must needs touch.

He did not think to ask himself: _Why in the hells would Fray put the thing in here?_ A stunning variety of unmentionables were arrayed before him, and Sidurgu had arrived at the bourn of a country whose sovereign lord admitted no logic. He summoned instead his courage. Cotton and silk in dark hues—the blues and blacks Fray favored—passed beneath his hands. As he disturbed them he detected the faint aroma of Fray’s cologne—Fray’s sweat… Beneath the tidy stacks of everyday smallclothes were trifles he’d never once seen Fray wear. These he beheld for a long time. To think of steady, stoic Fray in these delicate garments and naught else provoked an unfamiliar and heady excitement in him. He shut the drawer at last, his heart hammering in his chest.

It had naught to do with the man himself. No, he was quite weary of Fray. He could whisper in the ear of whomever he pleased; he could give freely of his faint smile, his firm touch, his rare, gilded laugh like a hard-won prize. Not one of them deserved it, of course, as it seemed they all mistreated him in the end, but if Fray wished to give it, they could have it. Fray was his friend. Fray did not belong to him—though sometimes at night Fray would coil ‘round his side in his sleep and hold him tightly, and it felt like perhaps Sid belonged to him…

He groaned aloud in frustration and walked a cramped circuit around the room until his head was clear. Along one wall by the mirror was a narrow chest of drawers; it was here that the two of them stored their miscellany, and it was the last place he could look. Of the four drawers, Sid had claimed only one, and in it were his paltry savings in a beaten lockbox, a lotion he used to treat his scales during the molt, a flask of mineral oil for the cleaning of his sword, and—wrapped carefully in cloth, out of sight—two scales from the tough black patches that’d guarded each of his parents’ hearts.

The whetstone should’ve been there. He’d checked already; he checked now again. There was no sign of it. He threw open the first of Fray’s drawers such that its contents rattled. This was his fault, after all. The effects inside were dull enough, though there was something pathological in how organized it was. A stack of letters, some heavily perfumed, that quite offended his senses. A menagerie of balms and creams he used to treat his tightly coiled hair… Materia, potions, salves, a rosewood wand in a neat little box… nothing of Sid’s.

He opened the next drawer. He smelled the clove and flax oil before it was fully open. A pipe like Master Ompagne’s, but with showy carvings. A wide folded strap of strong griffin leather, several fulms long. A rope of soft fiber, neatly coiled. The oils were no good for a blade, for both swiftly went rancid; he couldn’t think what they were for.

He nudged aside a row of mysterious articles whose use eluded him. There in the back, stark as daylight, were two cylinders of polished stone whose shapes were quite familiar to any man in Hydaelyn and almost any woman. The purpose of these was clear. They rolled gently forward and clinked against the glass bottles in the front, and the use of the oil became clear, too.

To look here had been a mistake. He closed the drawer and held his face in his hands, feeling the blood burning beneath his skin, and laughed the high uneven laugh of a fool far out of his depth.

Thoughts crowded his mind like a pack of scribes at the Mythril Eye, shoving, shouting, interrupting, each eager to present his own horrible query. Why did he need these when he had so many admirers? Was he so insatiable that the real thing was insufficient? Why did he have two? How did he find time to enjoy them? Why were they so long and so thick?

He tried, desperately, not to picture it. He pictured it. Fray, reclined on the bed, back arched, his powerful legs flung wide across the threadbare sheets. The bed they shared. The sheets they slept in. _Fray had fucked himself in their bed._

He dared to imagine Fray’s face. He quickly realized his error. His loins were throbbing.

He tore into the last drawer, hoping something within might offer a distraction. It was naught but papers. He flipped through them, not reading the words. He could not stop thinking about Fray’s hands around the stone shaft. About Fray’s cock, growing harder as he plunged the carven phallus into his body. About Fray’s eyes, closed in ease and pleasure, the lashes fluttering.

At the bottom of the stack of papers was a sheaf of yellowing woodblock prints torn from magazines. An advert for a much anticipated fight showing men, naked to the waist, wrestling each other. Nude heroes in a tender embrace before some ancient battle. Devotional plates of male saints and martyrs in the throes of divine ecstasy so intense their faces read as boldly lewd. An orgy in the Hells—from the caption intended as a cautionary tale, but revealing of its maker’s wants. He was marveling at the sheer quantity of different acts depicted in this last image—many of which he’d never imagined possible—when he realized he was not alone.

Fray stood in the doorway. He said absolutely nothing. His expression was unreadable. Perilous. Then Sid marked the anger bleeding into his dark face. He sat there, as exposed and as afraid as ever he had been; this quickened him yet more. He gently set the papers back in their place, and shut the drawer.

Fray said, “What use has a monk like you for a harlot’s playthings?”

Then that was what he’d done. That was his sin upon the stairs the night before—he must’ve called Fray a whore. He swallowed. No wonder he was angry.

Fray pushed the door closed with a finger. He locked it. “Look in the others, too, did you?” he asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Fray was upon him in seconds. He threw open the third drawer, pulled out the leather strap, and struck Sid hard across the face with the back of his hand. Sid froze in shock; it was just long enough for Fray to loop the strap around his neck, and pull.

“You are determined to make a fool of me,” he said.

“I was wrong to say it, and I never meant to,” Sid croaked, still on his knees.

“To think I came back here to apologize to you,” Fray said. He put his foot on Sid’s chest and shoved him backward to the floor. It was while he was restrained thus, with the rough leather tightening about his windpipe, that something alarming came to pass. Fray, with his bottomless gaze, oft seemed so fixated on the distant that a man could forget he existed, there, at his side. Now he looked Sid in the eye, and Sid had never had any secrets, and the charade was done. Sid was not angry; Sid was not chaste; Sid was no-one’s teacher or master. Sid was jealous. Sid was ravenous. Sid was helpless.

Fray kneeled. He took Sid’s hips between his legs, straddling him. Pleasure, like bright lightning, shot through his limbs. He struggled not for hope of escape, but simply to feel Fray’s thighs against him. His erection swelled, still sheathed, yearning for release. He tugged at the leather strap to goad Fray on in his game of punishment. Fray obligingly pulled it yet more taut. “I see,” he said, and his eyes narrowed. He rocked his hips, thrusting hard against Sid’s groin, and Sid gasped, fairly stunned by the sweetness of it. Fray’s free hand slid cold and surely down Sid’s stomach and into his trousers. His thumb brushed across the sclerotized flesh that guarded Sid’s manhood. A thrill of revelation—of knowing, at last, another’s touch—overtook him, and he could bear to fight no more. His cock, rigid, proud, and slick with mucous, emerged beneath Fray’s searching hand. Sidurgu turned away, his breathing ragged.

“Oh,” said Fray, with interest. His fingers closed around the shaft.

“Fuck!” he spat. There was within him still a boy who wished to hide his need. But he could feel Fray’s gaze upon his burning face; Fray saw his need. It throbbed beneath his fingers. A long moan of mad delight escaped his lips, and Fray leaned over him, triumphant. The leather strap slackened.

“The first night I stayed here,” Fray said, “I asked you quite explicitly to _stay out of my things_.”

“I’m sorry!”

Fray caressed the head of his cock with a thumb. Sid only just heard him mutter, “Are you?”

“Yes. Yes!” he cried, though to him it was an answer to a different question. Fray pulled his hand away and wiped it on Sid’s thigh. Then, with an impressive economy of motion, he bound Sid by the wrists to one leg of the bed with the leather strap. From the third drawer—still open—he took a phial from the panoply of bottles. The aroma as he poured it into his hand was delicate and nutty; it was the flaxseed oil. Fray’s dry fingers soothed the stinging flesh on Sid’s neck. The oiled ones took his prick in hand again and favored it with slow, deliberate, confident strokes.

He could not steady his heaving breaths, could not stifle the wordless song of delectation that lived now within him. He envisioned his end beneath Fray’s hand, the white come upon his brown flesh, and felt he might die—whether from shame or joy he could not decide. He bowed his back, arching toward Fray as if nearness alone would take him further. Then the luscious warmth of Fray’s hand upon him faded, and Sid looked up just in time to see the mild, attentive expression on Fray’s face as he slid an oiled finger into Sid’s asshole.

He threw his head back. His tail curled around his thigh. Fray’s other hand traveled down Sid’s chest, his belly—wandering to trace the scales—and pulled his trousers down around his knees. He gripped the base of Sid’s turgid cock and plunged his finger deeper inward.

His defeat was total. “I can’t,” he said, and gasped.

“Shall I stop?” said Fray.

Sid spread his legs. He said, “No. Please, no—”

“More, then?”

More, thought Sid. A paltry finger! Not more of this teasing, no. He wanted to be filled with all Fray had to give. To lie prone, unguarded, impaled upon his glory—this he craved. Fray drew out and ventured in again, adding a second finger, and lust overtook what Sid had been before. It knew but one word: “More,” he plead. "More."

“You’ve not been had before,” Fray said, and Sid growled, feeling that the fury of his desperation might destroy them both. He looked into Fray’s calm golden eyes and hated him for his caution. Sid rolled his hips, the better to feel Fray’s knuckles inside him. But Fray said, “Too much more and I’ll hurt you for true.”

“Then hurt me! I beg you.”

The faint, familiar smile appeared upon Fray’s lips. He leaned in so that his breath warmed the scales upon Sid’s neck, and said, “Not this time.”

Sid thought he might weep. He thrust upward into Fray’s loose grip in response, determined to satisfy himself. How close he was! If Fray would not fuck him, he would avail himself of Fray’s hand and fuck himself. But Fray returned his attention to Sid’s cock, and his deft, capable hands brushed away his anguish. A dizzying bliss fell upon him—urgency—Fray kissed his neck, his jaw, then his open lips—his tongue slid deep into Sid’s mouth, and this, at last, was too much.

The walls of self collapsed around him. He saw himself as Fray did. He bore witness to the bare flesh, the convulsion, the raw animal joy of his being, and felt love. Orgasm tore from his heart the illusion of his solitude; he wished to be with Fray for ever. He returned his obscene, insistent kiss. Alone, how could he imagine this? Alone, how could he achieve this? His atoms were alive. The breath within him sang, weaving art of his aether, remaking him anew. Fray took the head of his cock in hand; the come burst forth, and he was finished.

A hunger bloomed within him. He strained his arms against the leather binding. Could he take Fray in his arms—in his hands? Could he do this same mercy unto him? Fray sucked his lip, and pulled away, to all appearances unruffled—but for the gentle rise and fall of his chest, and the decadent perfume of his pheromones. The come dripped, thick and viscid, down Sid’s length. He was cold.

Fray leaned against the bed and said, “How long have you wanted that?”

_Hold me_, he thought. _Come back_, he thought. He said, “I didn’t.”

Fray wiped clean his hands on Sid’s trousers and got to his feet, the cryptic smile still upon his lips. “Maybe I’ll just leave you there for the maids to find,” he said.

“No, I mean—I—”

But Fray was gone, and Sid was forced to accept this as his penance. He consigned himself to languish on the floor, boneless, shamed—and stumped by the knot Fray had used on the binding. His whetstone was still missing. But there was one thing left to savor. The promise that there was more. The quiet words: _Not this time._


End file.
